Anti-gay graffiti traumatizes high school teacher in Stearns County town

Jake Pundsack awoke around 12:30 one morning last week to someone pounding the walls of his parents' Melrose, Minn., house, where he lives in the basement.

The Melrose High School biology and anatomy teacher peered outside and saw toilet paper hanging from the trees and an orange construction sign in the driveway. Kids being kids, he thought. It's a homecoming tradition for students to TP each other's houses, and Pundsack's little brother goes to school there. He returned to bed.

But Pundsack was horrified when he went out to his car a bit before 7 a.m. that day and saw what was scrawled in pink and blue window chalk markers. On his front and back car windows were obscene anti-gay messages. One of the messages implied Pundsack was a pedophile. His windshield wipers were disabled, which he assumed was to make it more difficult to remove the messages.

"My heart just sank," Pundsack said. "It still makes me sick. There's a very clear line — throwing toilet paper and doing a prank, but when you take it that far, it's hurtful, and it's a hate crime."

Pundsack, who also coaches the high school speech team, emailed the school superintendent and principal. The principal encouraged him to report what happened to the school resource officer, Pundsack said, who filed a report.

Dan Miller, chief deputy at the Stearns County Sheriff's Office, confirmed the office received a report and was in contact with the school and the victim. Pundsack told the Star Tribune he does not want those involved to face charges; making this a learning opportunity, he said, is more important than punishment.

Greg Winter, superintendent of Melrose Area Public Schools, declined an interview request, citing "data privacy."

"We have a great school and supportive parents and community," Winter said in an email.

Pundsack said the incident doesn't color his feelings for the small town outside St. Cloud that he was thrilled to return to after graduating from college in 2022. If anything, the community's reaction underscored why he loves Melrose.

Pundsack's family moved to Melrose from Shakopee when he was in ninth grade. He didn't come out as gay until college at Minnesota State Moorhead.

"Growing up, I didn't really hear about gay people being out and happy," he said.

He student-taught at the same high school he'd graduated from, and when he saw a job opening in Melrose he contacted the principal immediately.

"This is where everything happened in shaping me into the person I am today," Pundsack said. "I wanted to give back to this community that gave me so much in high school."

The beginning of last school year — Pundsack's first year teaching full time — was difficult. Some students scrawled anti-gay phrases on lab tables in Pundsack's classroom. He heard students throw around his name in the hallway with derogatory slurs.

But in time, Pundsack said — and with people realizing he's a good teacher and good human — that went away. While he does not discuss his sexual orientation with students, a group of LGBTQ students have made his classroom a morning gathering space.

"The other morning, I asked: 'Why do you come to my room?'" he said. "They're like, 'Mr. Pundsack, this is the one room in the whole school we know for fact we're safe as LGBTQ students.'"

Karen Molitor, a retired Melrose High School teacher, reached out to Pundsack in support; she feared something like this could force him to leave the district. Sara Christenson, a science teacher at Melrose Middle School who was Pundsack's mentor teacher last year, praised him as a teacher — a "professional perfectionist" — and as a forgiving human.

"It shook a lot of us," said Christenson, a neighbor of the Pundsacks. "Jake doesn't want to be the poster child for Melrose to say, 'Don't do this to the LGBTQ community.' But we have a lot of eyes that need to be opened for the hate that's still being spread around here. But Jake said, 'Let's mark it as a lesson and move on and learn from it.' That's the type of person Jake is."

Pundsack recognizes a learning curve as the community adapts to more diversity: "Having a little curveball of something new, it's scary at first, and lots of hatred and fear comes from ignorance."

But what he loves about Melrose is how tight-knit it is, and he's felt the full weight of that support after the incident last week and since he posted about it on Facebook this week. He's received letters of support from colleagues. Plenty of colleagues and neighbors have stopped by his home, asking how they can help advocate in the community. Several of the students involved apologized directly to Pundsack that same day, for which he said he was grateful.

"I'm more concerned that the kids involved learn from this than I am just about punishing them. If they just get punished and don't realize the damages, what's the point?" Pundsack said. "I want them to be able to grow as people, and I want our community to grow as well."